Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Are you interested in using Social CRM strategies? cover the basics first

Today I had the opportunity to attend a Social CRM event hosted by SugarCRM and IBM, the Keynote was delivered (masterfully) by Brian Vellmure. Brian casted a very wide net covering history, theory, practical aspects and more. However of all of this the one thing that stood out for me was something Brian mentioned in a one on one conversation before his Keynote and that he lately repeated during the presentation but was likely missed by many..

What Brian said (paraphrasing) was: "as I go into clients to advice them on strategy and tactics to achieve their business objectives I find once and again that I need to help them first with the basics" as I inquired about it I understood that what Brian was talking about is the Organization Culture, his point was: even if you have the technology tools, the processes and plans. If your organizational culture is composed of isolated groups, if it rejects the concept that the customer may have as much to say about your company as you do, if it fails to assign as much value to the recommendation and feedback as it does to the purchase then there is no coat of "social varnish" thick enough to make social work for you; you have to tackle the basics first.

Hi Filiberto - Thanks for sharing your impressions of Brian's speech. I work as a CRM consultant here in Houston and we run into this same situation with clients regularly. Often people want social because its popular, but without really knowing what it means. Social has to be implemented and understood by everyone in the organization in order for it to work.

Completely agree Aly, you made me remember a little experiment I mad back on 2008: I searched for the key reasons CRM projects failed; took snippets of one of the the articles I found and I replaced CRM by Social Media…. Please read the results here